Competitive planning programmes for global integration have been created in cities throughout developed and developing countries during the past 2 decades. In China, global aspiration planning has been characterised by the establishment of Pudong New Area of Shanghai in 1990, with a group of foreign direct investment (FDI)-oriented themed zones targeting different types of global flows. Pudong very rapidly became a focus of FDI in the city, which extended to China as a whole in the 1990s, and now is further extended to playing a global role. However, spatial planning for the themed zones in Pudong has been limited in its scope to the physical design, land use, and the pattern of transport routes. This limited role of land use planning has been inadequate to coordinate the mutual engagement between global and local factors; however, an improved mechanism for coordinating planning has not yet emerged to replace it. The competitive and entrepreneurial approach of land management in conjunction with the imperatives of global firms has effectively diminished the original plan’s intention that each zone should focus on particular industries, with each of them complementing the others.